Description
Chasse … courre : A stag hunt signed and dated 'Carle Vernet 1792' oil on canvas 503/4 x 77 in. (129 x 195.5 cm.) PROVENANCE Vicomte Pernety, 1906 (according to Dayot, 1906, see literature, below). Private collection and by descent to the present owner. LITERATURE A. Dayot, L'art et les artistes, Paris, 1906, pp. 1-7, no. 13, illustrated. Idem, Carle Vernet, Paris, 1925, p. 37, illustrated. H. B‚n‚zit, Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, et graveurs, 1976, Paris, p. 464. P. Bordes and R. Michel, Aux Armes et Aux Arts! Les Arts de la r‚volution 1789-1799, Paris, 1988, p. 47, fig. 39. J.F. Heim, Les salons de la r‚volution fran‡aise, Paris, 1989, p. 373. Collection des livrets des anciennes expositions au salon, 1991, VII, p. 23. B. Auvray, Dictionnaire g‚n‚ral des artistes de l'‚cole fran‡aise, 1997, p. 656. P. de Brantes, 'Chasse … Courre sous l'Ancien R‚gime', Equus et les Chevaux, Paris, XXVIII, April/May, 1997, pp. 6-7. EXHIBITION (Probably) Salon of 1793, no. 197, 'Une Chasse, dans le genre Anglais, au moment de l'attaque.' Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Carle Vernet, January-February 1925, no. 2. Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, Le Paysage fran‡ais de Poussin … Corot, May-June 1925, no. 325, pl. 15. Tours, H“tel de Ville, La chasse et la f“ret, 1943, no. 134. Paris, Galerie Charpentier, L'Automne, 1950, pl. 24. Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Cent chefs d'oeuvre de l'Art Fran‡ais, 1957, no. 104, ' Rendez-vous de chasse … M‚r‚ville chez le comte de Laborde.' Tours, Mus‚e des Beaux-Arts, L'art ancien dans les collections priv‚es de Touraine, 12 July-20 September 1959, no. 55. NOTES Third son of the artist Joseph Vernet, Carle was born in 1758 in Bordeaux, where his father was at work on his masterpiece series of the Ports de France which had been commissioned by the marquis de Marigny for King Louis XV. A precocious pupil, Carle was taught to paint by his father, but at the age of eleven entered the atelier of Nicolas-Bernard L‚pici‚ (see the Portrait of Carle Vernet by L‚pici‚ in the Louvre). By the age of fifteen, as described in his father's account books, Carle had become passionate about horses and riding, and regularly attended hunts. The horse was to become his favourite subject matter in his art. In 1779, the year he received second prize in the prix de Rome (after Jacques-Louis David) for a David and Abigail (present whereabouts unknown), Carle Vernet gave his father a fine oil study of a racing horse (present whereabouts unkown). In 1782, having won the Prix de Rome, he visited that city, where he was naturally drawn to the work of Raphael and Giulio Romano. Back in Paris, he married the daughter of the artist Moreau le Jeune in 1787 and exhibited regularly at the Salon between 1789 and 1836. On the death of his father, Carle inherited from him rooms at the Louvre, where his wife was to give birth to Horace Vernet, later also to become an artist. Profoundly affected by the Revolution - he was wounded by a bullet in 1789, and his sister Emilie Chalgrin was guillotined - he later turned to leading a more light-hearted existence, frequenting places such as the Caf‚ Foy, where artists of the era such as Isabey and Boilly, would meet. The latter exhibited in the salon of 1798 L'atelier d'Isabey (Paris, Louvre), where Vernet can be seen in the foreground with the painter LethiŠre. Carle Vernet's talent as a painter, draftsman and lithographer was well-known to his contemporaries, and he received important commissions to paint grand-scale scenes of recent history. His Battle of Marengo earned him praise from Napoleon and a L‚gion d'Honneur. He was also a great amateur of hunting and frequently joined in the duc d'Orl‚ans' parties. The latter commissioned from him a picture of a day's hunting he had spent with the duc de Chartres (Chantilly, Mus‚e Cond‚). Painted in 1792, during the years of the Terror, this picture was very probably one of two by the artist exhibited at the Louvre Salon of 1793, described as 'Une Chasse, dans le genre anglais, au moment de l'attaque'. Such descriptions were rarely detailed, but the dimensions do correspond to this picture, if the frame is included (see Collection des livrets des anciennes expositions au salon, 1991, VII, p. 23). The reception of the critics to the picture was highly favourable - the work was described by one as 'l'ouvrage le plus capital du salon' ( Explication par ordre des num‚ros et jugement motiv‚ des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure expos‚s au Palais National des arts, 1793, XVIII, no. 459, and see also 'Observations sur le salon du Louvre', Courrier fran‡ais, 1793, no. 243). The picture is certainly that exhibited in Paris in 1925 (see above) as Une partie de chasse … M‚r‚ville chez le marquis Fran‡ois de Laborde. The latter was an important collector and had bought Le grand triomphe de Paul-Emile (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), exhibited by the young Vernet at the Salon of 1789. The identification of the setting as M‚r‚ville, home to the comtes de Laborde, is however unlikely. Although the certain identification of the people depicted in the present picture has not yet been possible, it is likely that the man preparing to mount his horse on the right is a portrait of the artist (compare, for example, the portrait of Carle Vernet in Joseph Vernet's Mediterranean harbour at sunset with the artist and his family of 1788, sold in these Rooms, 10 July 1998, lot 43). The precedent for the portrayal of the nobility hunting had been well established in France by this time. Jean-Baptiste Oudry's Louis XV Hunting Stag in the Forest of Saint-Germain, dated 1730, painted for Marly (and now in Toulouse, Mus‚e des Augustins) was widely known and effectively made Oudry's career. The present work captures all the elegance of that picture but concentrates more on the landscape in which the pastime is practiced than Oudry's picture, which focuses equally on the huntsmen and the dogs attacking the stag. The broad composition in the present work, with the large tree on the left playing such an important part, and the sweeping landscape beyond, seems to recall some of the hunting scenes by the great English artist George Stubbs, and, in particular, his Grosvenor Hunt of 1762, in the collection of the Duke of Westminster - a picture that was itself possibly inspired by Oudry's canvas of 1730.
